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Bucheon Gallery

June 27 - September 1, 2008

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389 Grove Street San Francisco, CA 94102
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Reception: June 27, 6-8pm David Gremard Romero and Bucheon Gallery are pleased to announce a new exhibition of the artist’s work. The ambitious show of pastel and oil paintings, textiles, video, drawings and ceramics will open Friday, June 27, with a reception for the artist from 7-10pm, and will feature a performance by dancers from the Aztec dance group Mixcoatl Anahuac. The central preoccupation unifying Gremard Romero’s work is an engagement with the practice of the old masters, particularly those of the Baroque and Rococo periods. Their perfection of craft, their exploration of narrative modes, and their explicit connection to history and politics are a source of continuing fascination and inspiration to the artist’s work. Embedding contemporary iconography and themes in a classical figurative craft, he teases out the relationships and continuities between classical art and current culture. The current body of work specifically explores the cultures and ideologies that formed during the colonial era of the New World, especially in California and Mexico, and the legacies that this conflict has had for our the present. The work takes as its inspiration contemporary Mexican Lucha Libre. The Luchador costumes are treated as blank canvases on which the history of particular conflicts can be depicted, transforming narratives into theatre and drama, and transfiguring the wearer, who can be anyone, into historical characters, concepts and mythological figures which the costumes represent, while bringing ancient stories into a contemporary context. The style of the work references both Pre-Colombian art forms and European or Colonial paintings, establishing a dialectic of the two. The costumes, while his design, were hand embroidered by the Zapotec Indians of Southern Mexico, and incorporate traditional motifs to suggest continuities between their (and the artist’s) ancient forbears and our current culture.